by Emily Masucci, PhD Candidate, Department of Anthropology
For many historically marginalized women, the state and its institutions are not perceived as reliable. State-sponsored violence against women—low-income, afro-descendant, and indigenous women in particular—is a weapon with which the Brazilian state was founded and has maintained power since. The fabric of Brazil is stained by histories of forced sterilization of indigenous and afro-descendant women, of brutal rapes of young women students by military officials during the dictatorship, and recently by the calculated political feminicide1 of Rio de Janeiro city councilwoman Marielle Franco. Given this legacy, survivors of gender-based violence (GBV) are justifiably apprehensive of appealing to state institutions as they pursue safety and redress.
Indeed, feminist and women’s movements in “post-authoritarian” Brazil, predominately white and middle class, pressured their nascent democracy to address this issue by “engendering” branches of state institutions. As a result, Brazil boasts a host of gender-specialized state services oriented around justice (women’s police, specialized courts, public defenders) and care (women’s centers, social workers, shelters, mental health care, support groups, crisis hotline).
While gender-specialized state services have received international acclaim, research suggests that this model for GBV prevention and intervention has critical limitations, including how well it serves women of diverse racial, ethnic, and class backgrounds and how readily it withstands shifts in Brazil’s increasingly volatile political landscape.
Today, with the rise of far-right politics under president Jair Bolsonaro, Brazilian conservatives are waging a pointed attack on so-called “gender ideology,” as legislatures at the federal, state, and municipal levels have stripped GBV and any mentions of “gender” from the country’s public policy agenda. Meanwhile, in 2019, feminicide rates increased across the country by 7.2 percent and in Rio de Janeiro by approximately 98 percent.2 The vast majority of cases occurred in the city’s urban periphery, an extremely low-income and predominantly afro-descendant region of Rio de Janeiro. This pattern evidences how marginalized women disproportionately feel the effects of this anti-gender politics on their bodies and in their communities.
With the generous support of the Center for the Study of Women in Society, I was able to conduct preliminary dissertation research in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in August and September 2019. My ethnographic research set out to understand how low-income, afro-descendant women experience and organize around GBV at the local level. There are a series of barriers that prevent marginalized women, in particular, from accessing gender-specialized state services in Brazil—such as long travel times to services, cost, legal jargon, stigma, and fear of police (and other state actors). Yet, limited access to state services does not mean that marginalized women fail to achieve redress altogether. When communities cannot rely on the state for protection or access to rights, there is a spectrum of ways in which they cope with and seek to minimize violence.
My preliminary research revealed that marginalized women in local communities are actively organizing alternative unofficial spaces of justice and care for themselves. While in Rio de Janeiro, I met members of women’s organizations, such as Redes da Maré and Café das Fortes, who are approaching GBV and redress from the perspective of community healing and transformation through dance and music, dialogue, restorative support groups for abusers, and anti-violence activism. These organizations reflect the everyday lived experience of violence in historically marginalized communities—one in which GBV cannot necessarily be disentangled from underfunded education systems, everyday police violence, limited access to health care and child care, high rates of unemployment, extreme wealth inequality, and so on.
My dissertation project builds upon previous research on GBV and the politics of gender-specialized state services in two ways. First, GBV has mainly been studied through two approaches: 1) as a sequence of causes and effects, both direct and indirect and/or 2) through analyses of acts of violence themselves. Together these approaches reflect a tendency to fix GBV to a linear timeline, as a series of events with a before, during, and after. This project shifts the frame of analysis to focus on the continuities of GBV and how low-income women address this ongoing, intergenerational issue in their communities.
Second, this project seeks to expand our understanding of the concrete impacts of gender-specialized state services on local communities. Until now, research has focused inward on the structure and internal dynamics of these services. By shifting the focus outward, the proposed research traces how these services shape outcomes of justice and care among women in low-income, afro-descendant communities. In doing so, this research has significance beyond Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and offers transferable lessons about the specific sociocultural, economic, and political conditions that undergird advances toward effective gender reforms or restrict them—with practical implications for policymakers, women’s and human rights advocates, and NGOs in Brazil and abroad.
While in Rio de Janeiro, I spoke with women involved in anti-violence community organizing who often stated “A luta continua” (The struggle continues) as both an expression of solidarity and a call to action. This phrase encapsulates low-income women’s ethic of organized resistance and invites further investigation into the nature of their “struggle.” Ultimately, this work is about more than precarity and violence. Rather, it seeks to foreground the ways in which marginalized communities are tapping into collective histories of “struggle” to incite meaningful change and to reclaim futures that have been historically stolen.
For information on how to contribute to the COVID-19 response in the Maré, one of Rio de Janeiro’s most vulnerable communities, visit: http://redesdamare.org.br/en/quemsomos/coronavirus.
— Emily Masucci is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology and recipient of a CSWS Graduate Student Research Grant.
References
1 Renata Souza, a leader of the Socialism and Liberation Party (PSOL) in Rio de Janeiro’s state legislature, is developing the concept of feminicide: https://brasil.elpais.com/brasil/2019/03/14/politica/1552562116_307529.html.